SlideShare for Business

Why marketers should take a closer look at SlideShare

Todd believes there are three reasons why marketers should take a closer look at SlideShare.

1. Pure traffic. SlideShare is one of the highest-traffic sites on the Internet, receiving over 60 million unique visitors every month. It gives sheer exposure to your potential audience and SlideShare credibility for search engines.

You’ll discover amazing things that can happen when you use the same content from your website on SlideShare. The inter-play between content and distribution in one place is very unique in terms of what SlideShare delivers.

2. Business audience. It’s a platform that’s about business. You’ll find out the six words that are the most used tags on content in SlideShare.

3. Leads. The lead-capturing model that SlideShare has been using for the last couple of years is a very simple tool. It’s easy for the visitor. You’ll hear about how flexible the lead form is for the marketer and the control it gives when you ask for lead generation.

A quick overview of SlideShare

Todd explains how SlideShare began as a place for people to upload the PowerPoints they were presenting at a conference or an event. Since then, it has evolved into a content marketing platform for any form of digital content.

With SlideShare, you can take any sort of presentation and insert videos and record an audio track and lay it over the top. You can then even use it as an audiovisual presentation. It’s a platform for you to share any type of digital content including Word documents, infographics, webcasts and HD video. It has moved far beyond the original premise.

SlideShare has evolved into a content marketing platform for digital content.

If you’re a blogger with great content on your blog and you choose to house it on SlideShare, you could decide to use your content on SlideShare specifically to capture leads. There are certain ways to handle lead capture on SlideShare versus your own site.

Todd states that if you have content that has a complex design, when you host that document on SlideShare, it enables you to embed it very neatly. You’ll learn why you should think of it as an enhanced YouTube embed, rather than seeing it as something competing with your website. It supports and drives traffic to your own platform.

Listen to the show to find out why the average use on SlideShare is probably far less sophisticated than what the average marketer or professional is using and trying to achieve out of it.

How Kelly Services uses SlideShare

Todd shares how Kelly Services started to get deep on SlideShare about 2-3 years ago.

At present, they have an off-brand on SlideShare called The Talent Project. It’s where all their major content items including research reports, ebooks, infographics and videos are stored.

The Talent Project on SlideShare.

You’ll hear why they have a platinum network account and how it works for them. The “network” part means that their most prolific content producers have individual accounts, but the relevant content is tagged and rolled up into a mothership account.

You’ll hear about how SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn in March 2012, and how LinkedIn has since gone through dramatic philosophical and strategic changes in the role they’re going to play.

The user experience. When it comes to adding content to SlideShare, Todd believes that if you have used YouTube, then you have passed SlideShare 101.

When it comes to uploading content, it’s no different to any other system. It will automatically detect whether it’s vertical or horizontal, whether it’s a video and will place it into the right category.

One of the advantages of SlideShare is that the system scrapes text from your content, whether it’s text on slides or a PDF. There is very little you need to do to optimize the page.

From a user’s perspective, you’ll learn how to start to become active and build a following.

Analytics. You’ll hear Todd describe in detail about one of his favorite reports from SlideShare, which is a snapshot of the last thousand views on all of your content.

With this data you’ll get a sense of where your content is trending from and also the referring URL.

Listen to the show to find out why the referring URL is absolute gold.

Common mistakes people make when it comes to SlideShare marketing

Todd says that one of the obvious mistakes is that people fail to promote the channel in its own right. The most simple thing that nearly everyone misses is to link to their SlideShare account from their own website.

It’s not until recently that SlideShare has been taken seriously in terms of their tools and widgets.

SlideShare is constantly enhancing its tools.

Todd has seen companies gain hundreds of new SlideShare followers in weeks, just by making one simple change.

You’ll hear the different ways in which a subscriber of your SlideShare channel can receive notification whenever you update your content.

Listen to the show to learn why you should intentionally trend and seed your content on Twitter and Facebook before you try to promote it with SlideShare.

How lead capture works within SlideShare

Todd explains that when you use SlideShare with third-party services, there are various models where you can capture leads and integrate them with your marketing automation, lead generation and ultimately into services such as Salesforce.

If someone is a SlideShare member and they are logged in at the point of coming to a form, then the form will auto-populate. Once they click Submit, it will bring their information in. It’s a very simple experience from the user’s perspective.

Add a lead capture form to the end of your SlideShare presentation.

As a marketer, you can establish when you want that form to appear. You can gate the content right at the beginning, the middle or the end and make it mandatory or optional at any point. If they think it’s valuable enough content, they will fill out the form.

You’ll learn about the customization of the form, what approach to use for different types of content and experiment with how you want the content to be consumed.

Listen to the show to hear how SlideShare started to resonate with B2B content marketers.

Options for getting leads

Todd shares how a few marketers have added a call to action within a slide deck, rather than using a sales lead–type message.

When someone is consuming your thought leadership and knowledge, at what point do you slip in a sales message? Todd talks about the calls to action you can use to add visitors to your email list. The opt-ins increase significantly from that point.

Listen to the show to find out how SlideShare deals with the desktop and mobile experience, and how that impacts your lead generation.

How to build up a SlideShare following as a marketer

Todd explains that when it comes to networks, a lot of people don’t always put in the time and effort to find out who they are connected with on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. You need to identify the people in your key networks who have a SlideShare account and be proactive in reaching out to them there.

The more content you add, the more visibility you generate, which will lead to more views.

Todd states that the power of video on SlideShare is hugely overlooked. You’ll hear how a 90-second talking head video will guarantee you more views on SlideShare than on YouTube.

Listen to the show to hear how SlideShare is a great network for offering fun experimentation.

Discovery of the Week

For example, if you sell a product/service that’s expensive or complex, or you have people who are likely to ask questions about an event, then it probably makes sense to have some sort of means to answer people’s questions on the spot.

SnapEngage is a really cool tool to help with answering customer questions on the spot.

SnapEngage allows you to embed a widget on any particular page of your website.

At Social Media Examiner, we had a team of 5 people who were on Skype all the time during our recent event.

SnapEngage integrates with Skype and allows you to set up different tiers. When someone visits your page, a little window pops up after a certain amount of time with a picture of whoever your contact person is and it gives your customers the ability to have an instant live chat.

You’ll hear how this works over Skype and the some of the features SnapEngage offers, such as:

How long the discussion lasted

See the IP address

What part of the world the customer is from

SnapEngage has been instrumental in helping us answer people’s questions and ultimately lead them down the path to a sale. It’s a cool social tool that brings social support to your website. There are different rates of service to check out.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you.

Something Is Coming Soon…

Here’s a little tease. If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you’ll notice that I’ve been talking about a special project called Project Torch. I can’t go into detail right now about what it is, but what I can tell you is that my team has been working for months behind the scenes.

Just to give you some perspective, I think it’s going to make Social Media Examiner look like a little pet project.

Make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for more information on Project Torch.

Michael Stelzner is the founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner, and host of the Social Media Marketing podcast. He also authored the books Launch and Writing White Papers. Other posts byMichael Stelzner »

Awesome interview Mike! Looking forward to learn more about “Project Torch” I’m pretty sure it is going to be great! Thanks Todd for sharing those excellent Slideshare pointers!

Let’s rock the weekend everyone!

~John Lee Dumas

http://www.intervistedisuccesso.com/ Leonardo Plebani

That’s a really cool topic. SlideShare is really growing reality and listen to this interview will help lots of people.

I didn’t know about SnapEngage, thanks for sharing!

http://sociallyacceptable.me/ Vincent Orleck

This is perfect timing…created a profile on slideshare for my company a little while back but have just recently decided on how to utilize it. We know we definitely want to, and this helps move us forward. Thanks guys!

Dara Khajavi

I have seen SlideShare before, but I did not realize all of its potential! Thanks for this great post. I will definitely start using SlideShare.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Thanks Vincent

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Glad you found it useful

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Thanks John

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

It is pretty amazing isn’t it Dara

Shelia

Great episode. I must admit I’ve never used Slideshare, but certainly think I should be – or at least recommending it to my clients. Thanks again Michael, love the podcast!

http://www.marketingyourfarm.com/ Iain Robson

I just started using Slideshare.

It seems like there is so much potential there. You really need to get ahead of the wave right now.

The biggest thing to think about is create great looking presentations. If it is just words, you may not generate the same effect you’re looking for.

A good few hours that I spent on this podcast, when I mean good few hours I mean, charge, recharge the device finally get heard of a solid hour of the cast. – Time to invest on a mobile iphone charger! Thanks for sharing.

http://www.facebook.com/aleshia.green.1 Aleshia Green

I have been thinking about doing a slide share..this just confirms that I need to get on the ball and just do it!

CharlieDog & Friends

Love this podcast (as always). I’m actually thinking of hiring someone part-time to manage our Slideshare account, when we get it functional. We’re thinking of a weekly slideshow to highlight abandoned pets from around the country who had a bad start, but found their way out of shelters and into permanent, loving homes in the past week. And we wouldn’t have had this idea without your podcastings. Keep it going, SME! We LOVE you!

Thanks! I really think you’re doing a great job on the podcast. I have seen Slide Shares on other sites, but didn’t “get it” on why I needed to make them. I will definitely work on creating them to go with future presentations.

http://www.antoniocalero.com/ Antonio Calero

Haven’t used Slide Share too much….yet…. It’s on my (never-ending growing) list of things to do. But it does look great and in fact after reading this post I may re-allocate the task to the firs positions of that list.

What are your thoughts about Prezi? I’ve seen some excellent presentations with this and I think it offers also a great way of sharing content online. Plus it adds some extra effects that certainly boosts engagement and sharing….

http://www.facebook.com/michelle.lagrone.1 Michelle LaGrone

I just really started looking at SlideShare this morning. Thankfully I still had this email in my inbox to refer back to. I’m still a little fuzzy on what is going on on SlideShare, but it seems that it is great for SEO. Now I just have to figure out how to use it for our car dealerships…

Thanks for this post!

http://SportsGeekHQ.com Sean Callanan

Listened to this in the gym yesterday, one problem I’ve had with Slideshare was uploading a Keynote and the fonts used aren’t available and it looks poor. Usually I create images then upload a keynote with no fonts but the downside is there is no text from an SEO point of view. Any tips on how to get around this issue?

Judy Haar

Great article. Am looking into Slideshare.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Thanks so much

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Anna – Have a listen to the show to learn more

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Cool, good luck experimenting with it Michelle

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Antonio – I have no opinion on Prezi as I have never used it. Seems more like a fancy way to throw words up on the screen in my opinion

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ Michael A. Stelzner

Hey Sean – Good feedback. Have you tried exporting as PPT and seeing how it looks first?

http://SportsGeekHQ.com Sean Callanan

Yeah I have I think it is a case of using more web friendly fonts in my presentation if I really do want the text available for SEO reasons. Perfectionist in my wants the slideshare to look as good as it does when I present

Here is an example where I exported images and made “dumb” slides from them.

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